Archive for February, 2012

I’ve written a few blogs in the past on using a little known feature in MDT where you can deploy applications based on the previous inventory. This a fairly unknown feature that’s been around in BDD/MDT for quite some time.

Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) provides features to manage BitLocker encryption of computers in an enterprise. More information on MBAM can be found here.

BitLocker creates recovery information at the time of encryption and MBAM stores that information in the recovery data store. While MBAM can update its recovery data store when the agent is installed on a system that is already encrypted, it is preferable to have MBAM control the encryption process. MBAM Encryption is controlled by Group Policy. Group Policy is not applied during a SCCM Task Sequence. It is possible to have MBAM start encryption during the task sequence, the techniques are described in the following whitepaper Using MBAM Data Encryption With MDT http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=229053

Greg Ramsey has been a roll lately with blog posts. He’s published another really great read over on his blog.

"I’m a bit of a fan of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), but today’s post is a bit of a ‘buyer beware’. I’ll sum it up, and then provide some detail and give you some ideas of where this can be a very bad thing"

ConfigMgr OSD does a great job of injecting drivers ‘on the fly’ into your OS Deployment process. For example, you can create task sequence steps with conditional statements to apply drivers for a specific model. That’s great for your standard build, but how do you handle those one-offs, those non-standard builds? Here’s a process that you can you for those non-standard builds, or for that hardware that you’re testing, but haven’t quite committed to being a standard yet. All we need is a vbScript, raw drivers, and an additional step in your task sequence (haven’t tested with MDT, but should work there as well). The following process ONLY works on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. If there is enough demand, I’ll create a similar script for previous Operating System versions.